This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Finally some uplifting Elon news in this sub
Not uplifting enough. He still got Tesla , space x and tons of other companies he has invested in.
Tesla is under investigation for lying about range numbers, Twitter sees most advertisers leave and gets hit with disinfo/bigotry lawsuits and also mistreatment of employees, there are rumors of the gov taking a deeper look at spacex’s starlink situation
Nothing of Elon’s is in a great place right now. Tesla has been losing market share after blowing their insane lead in the EV game, Twitter a sinking ship, space x is the only thing that is remotely stable and forward facing but even with that Elon’s pandering to Putin has put that at risk.
just two of its clients had purchased ads on X last month. That was down from 31 brands in September last year,
This is a drop we have not seen before for any major advertising platform,
Come on Elon, you got this. 😜
Ebiquity said its analysis appears to contradict statements made by X CEO Linda Yaccarino
Yes that's what I thought, a bit of reality distortion and gas lighting the public will surely solve this. 😋
Remarkable how much Elons tactics for the past few years remind me of Trump.
Remarkable how much Elons tactics for the past few years remind me of Trump.
He's just the Gen X version of Trump.
Does anyone else consider it plausible that flushing $44 billion is worth the cost if it removes that meddlesome social media platform that activists rely on to syndicate human rights abuses and document all the other terrible stuff that happens around the world?
There's something way sketch about this entire narrative
Or, Elon Musk is just an idiot doing the same idiot things he's always done.
Bingo.
That dick bag tried to rinse and repeat the same BS management strategy he used at a car company on a tech company and wouldn't you know, it's cratering right before or eyes.
Shocking.
This absolutely feels like a Hanlon's razor type situation especially given what we have learned about Elon musk over the last 5 or so years. The whole evil genius shtick just doesn't fly anymore. He's an idiot who just happens to have made enough good or lucky business decisions in the past to get him where he is now.
It's impossible to say what anything is worth to a person who can lose 44 billion dollars and still have so much money left that the next 10 generations of their lineage won't ever have to work again.
It's insane to think of that as a trivial amount of money, but musk could literally lose 99% of his money and it wouldn't impact his life at all, except for his hobby of bankrupting corporations.
As obscenely wealthy as he is, that wealth comes from bis assets not cash in hand. $20B of the $44B paid was cash, some of which was from selling some of his Tesla shares. Further to that, Tesla stock dropped so significantly it caused his net worth to drop by a further $30B.
So as a result he’s no longer so rich he could do it all again and still have more money than he could possibly spend in hundreds of lifetimes? No? Still super rich? Then it’s not really a meaningful distinction.
I don't think so because another platform will pop up eventually. It's too much money for a short term thing
It's probably a combination. He considered buying it for reasons including the above. He didn't intend to pay $44 billion or actually buy the company. He didn't intend to ruin it.
I don't consider that plausible. I think must didn't really want to buy Twitter but fucked up and was forced to.
Did he actually paid 44B of his own money? How much of the money came from saudi investors and twitter leverage debt?
I don't think the exact amount is known, but he got money from a lot of sources and the bulk of it was Elon's own money (or at least, his own assets). He also sourced a lot of money from other American billionaires (Larry Ellison for example).
It's likely the Saudis invested very little... although they did invest enough that Elon has to have given them something in return.
Nobody involved in that purchase expected to make money on it. The price was far too high.
Visa, for example, spent $10 in the 12 weeks to October 6, compared to $77,500 during the same period last year, according to Sensor Tower's data.
I'm no business genius like musk, but I'm gonna take a guess that wouldn't even pay the bills for the ridiculous X sign he put on the roof and then had to take down.
Why pay the $10? If you're going to drop from 77k to 10 you might as well drop to zero, right? There must be some nuance or legalese around this that I don't understand
Isn't $10 the monthly subscription fee or whatever it's called? Maybe they just want to keep that checkmark besides their name.
brand protection campaign. You run a minimal spend on every CDN on your trademarks as a method of ensuring each platform connects and protects your name back to your business entity
It's probably baked into their contract that there is a fee or other penalty for canceling. Or maybe an AI just decided $10 was slightly more optimal than 0. Or perhaps the contract period ended minutes after the billing period.
~~Lmao Elon 😂~~
~~BTW all his escapades are the biggest unpaid marketing campaign in recent history. He may not be doing it deliberately but clearly it's working, media, and people continue to talk about Musk. This free puiblicity makes his businesses more likely to succeed as people are aware of every step he takes including new businesses.~~
After careful consideration I revise my statement: Elon is the smartest person in the world as he has the most money. Just like McDonald's has the best food as they've got the most sales.
Just hypothetically, jokes and feelings aside for discussion sake, if we assume Elon had a plan after taking over (whether he did it by mistake or whatever) what do you think it could be?
To use the platform to support rightwing candidates in fachist/ hostile takeovers of democratic governments.
This would make sense. His affiliations with state governments, which he plays against each other when looking to set up somewhere, would be reinforced if he could control the conversation. Then there’s China, where he’s the one beholden to the government, and he could offer some control to help shape their international image in return for just access to cheap labour and an export market, or to the Saudis where he can always find more funds.
Saudi Arabia felt Twitter was a problem, so they paid Elon to take it down in a way it wouldn't come back.
Why would they "take it down" when anyone with even a modicum of business knowledge would assume a better replacement would be created and take it's place. This making the next version of Twitter even harder to control.
Taking it over and controlling the content on it is/was the smart play, especially if you're going to fork over the $ to buy it outright.
Stop trying to justify Elon's shit business decisions. He can just be a fucking moron that got lucky with a few strategic purchases.
I mean, maybe a better replacement does come. But just like reddit, it takes a long time and not everyone will actually leave. Now like reddit, it's just full of BS and has fragmented the community. If the goal was to tear down a platform where people can organize while not fully killing it (preventing the immediate need for a replacement) then he's doing a good job.
Yes he could be just an idiot, but all throughout history evil men have done evil things and used their "ignorance" as an excuse. People calling you stupid is much easier to manage than people calling you evil.
if the goal is to collapse the business they would have done it a lot faster
To jerk himself off about being a genius businessman.
I think he was only interested in building a great big echo chamber for his own twisted ideas. Profitability is only a secondary concern.
Oh wow you can't even read the news article unless if you sign up for it. That is so stupid
Bypass most paywalls, also deny them the clicks. archive.today have a plug-in for Firefox, other paywall bypass tools are available.
When it says advertising, it always makes me think they mean product placement in the comments.
Elon’s mean tweets and disinformation do that, and the product being placed is hate speech.
It's paywalled and I'm a little confused by the apparent disparity between the title and the claim that most of the advertisers have since returned?
Which is it?
The claim in the headline is based on one agency seeing only 2 of its 28 clients using X.
The X statement says that about 90% of its biggest spenders from last year are advertising again.
These could both be true. My opinion is that the first doesn’t mean much and the second is damn lies.
I am sure you can trust everything out of X. Just like you can trust Musk. If I remember correctly he claimed it was the Jews 😱 who were to blame for the decline in X advertisements. I guess he correctly identified the problem and fixed it. /S 😆
Yeah, I have no trust in Musk or X. I'm just trying to understand the actual circumstances. Just because I want X to fail and Musk to go bankrupt, doesn't mean I should uncritically examine headlines that conform to my hopes and expectations.
Edit: So the full story is the major advertising conglomerate is all but calling X and Musk liars. Delicious.
"Most" seems to be doing some incredibly generous work here.
Fucking lying ass muskrat.
I live in Ireland so there was always limited advertising on Twitter. There might be the odd campaign but it was blessedly free of ads in general. Then one day I logged in and it was a tidal wave of hot garbage - ads in Turkish, trade fairs in Chinese provinces, African NGOs etc. Just absolutely irrelevant bottom of the barrel dreck every 2 or 3 tweets in the feed. No matter how much I blocked there was more just like it.
I don't know if this was an aberration, a bug or a cynical attempt to screw over advertisers by draining their wallets. I just uninstalled Twitter and used the web version with an ad blocker. I don't even see this shit any more. I wonder if the advertisers are still getting charged though. I hope they are though since paying $$$ for minimal engagement might convince them how worthless the platform is.
No one should buy anything from Twitter or any of the other businesses owned by this crazy idiot
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ebiquity, which works with 70 of the top 100 top-spending advertisers, according to media research company COMvergence, said that just two of its clients had purchased ads on X last month.
Ebiquity said its analysis appears to contradict statements made by X CEO Linda Yaccarino who said in an on-stage interview last month that "90% of the top 100 advertisers have returned to X in the last twelve weeks alone."
An X spokesman clarified that the 90% figure referred to X's 100 top spenders from the prior year, and declined to publicly comment about Ebiquity's findings.
Twitter's largest clients have typically also been among the biggest spending global advertisers, such as Amazon, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and IBM, Bloomberg previously reported, citing data from the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
A number of advertisers have stopped or drastically reduced their spending on X over the past year, amid concerns about the content it hosts and the general reliability and effectiveness of its ad platform.
A review of data from Sensor Tower conducted by progressive watchdog group Media Matters found that while some advertisers had technically returned to purchasing ads on X, they were doing so at just a fraction of the level of their previous spend.
The original article contains 535 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Fuck this bastard
:o
Tja
No ad is even better, but thats a impossible mission.
